Desistance

Much research on crime, delinquency, and deviance is concerned with the onset and persistence of illegal or nonconforming behavior. The bulk of research on deviance explores the reasons why some people start engaging in a deviant or criminal lifestyle, but what is also useful to the study of deviance is the exploration of why some people cease their deviant activity. In fact, many deviants, especially those who engage in crime, eventually terminate their deviant careers. Desistance is a concept used to explain and understand the many factors that influence the cessation of deviant behavior.

For low-rate offenders, desistance from crime and deviance occurs most often during or after adolescence and includes a normative “aging-out” process. Those offenders who are labeled as “chronic,” or high-rate, however, have a much longer desistance process. This maturation out of offending is usually a process that occurs over several years. Many academics who study changes in deviant behavior insist that desistance should not be viewed as a singular event where a person instantly decides to quit the behavior in question. Rather, viewing changes in offending as a result of a wide range of influences that happen throughout a person's life course allows us to understand variations in behavior over time. The process of desistance may include slow and eventual changes.

The study of desistance is hampered by measurement problems. Because desistance is often conceptualized as a process occurring throughout one's life, those studies with short measurement periods (6 months to 2 years) are unable to detect deviant behavior after the research is terminated and therefore can only make claims of desistance that are confined to the study period. Additionally, relying on arrest records can only provide examples of behavior that leads to detection by law enforcement, not antisocial or illegal behavior that goes unreported or undetected. To address these issues, the ideal methodological approach is to incorporate systematic longitudinal survey studies that follow a participant cohort throughout their lives.

John Laub and Robert Sampson have greatly contributed to the study of desistance with their theory of age-graded controls. Their life course framework places primacy on “turning points,” those substantial events that affect a person's life. These turning points are provided by what is typically represented [Page 190]in the literature as conventional institutions, such as employment, marriage, and military service. These institutions can assist in the desistance process by removing an offender from his or her criminal or deviant lifestyle and, more important, from his or her deviant peers. Additionally, the social controls that are exerted from one's work or spouse can have a great effect in building support and facilitating emotional attachments for offenders. The more offenders can become invested in meaningful social structures and relationships that provide new prosocial identities, the more likely that they will, over time, reorient their lives and commitments to conformity. This is not to say, however, that these turning points will necessarily change deviant or criminal trajectories; rather, what researchers observe are the changes to social bonds and social controls and how they may positively influence an offender's life course.

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